More of an anthology film than one feature length narrative, The Bible: In the Beginning... is one of those occasional outlets from John Huston where he really does try to stretch himself cinematically. Derided at the time for a certain esoteric air about it, the telling of the major events of the first twenty-two chapters of Genesis is something of a mix between an art film, a religious film, and John Huston film, soaring high for stretches before kind of bumbling through its largest segment without any real sense of structure to end it all.
The major stories from the opening book of the Bible told in the film are the creation, the expulsion from Paradise, the murder of Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, and then as much of Abraham as possible. My favorite of the major short films is Cain (Richard Harris) murdering Abel (Franco Nero), which also happens to be the second shortest of them at about ten minutes. My least favorite is Abraham (George C. Scott), and it really amounts to the fact that so much gets told and without any real eye towards narrative structure. We end up lurching back and forth from one major storyline to the next without any real contextualizing adhesive to make them relate to each other on any deeper level than they're all happening around the same guy.
And I think that points to the one main issue with the film, a film that I overall appreciate. The film is at war with itself as to whether it is a cinematic adaptation of the source material, as evidenced most strongly in the early creation montage, or a more literal translation of the Bible's events like the telling of Abraham's story. I think it only fully commits to the cinematic side of things in that Cain and Abel story, most of it hinging on Harris' tortured performance as Cain, screaming to the skies as John Huston as the Voice of God asks where his brother has gone.
The story that strikes the best balance between the two is the story of Noah. Keeping dialogue largely to a minimum, it shows Noah (Huston again) as the patriarch of his family organizing the construction of the ark, the procession of animals, the torrential rainstorm (water miniatures are hard to do, and this film does them quite well), and the waiting for hitting land. It's a documentation of the events with enough cinematic flare to keep it from feeling stodgy.
I do wish that he had kept the voiceover out of the opening thirty minutes or so, showing creation (if you gave a student editor 10 hours of stock footage and told him to make creation, this is about what he would have come up with) and Adam (Michael Parks) and Eve (Ulla Bergryd) eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The voiceover makes it feel like translation where, I kept imagining it without the voiceover, it could have been something more purely cinematic without it. I kept thinking that no one was ever going to come to this movie as a substitute for the Holy Book, so why no trust the audience to know it well enough to be able to follow along without Huston's sonorous voice making it more obvious. I was reminded more than once of Terrence Malick's creation of the cosmos sequence in The Tree of Life. Visually, Eden reminded me heavily of John Boorman's Excalibur as well, though I assume that they just had the same predecessor influences rather than this being inspiration for the King Arthur film.
The Tower of Babel is a short sequence, but it was obviously very expensive with huge crowd shots and one very large set (Noah's Ark was also a very large set, so is the later Sodom set...this was obviously filmed in Italy). It's interesting to watch.
And then there's Abraham. Now, I don't think that any one part of the Abraham story is all that bad, it's just everything without any sense of structure. There's his relationship with Sarah (Ava Gardner), her inability to have children, her Egyptian slave Hagar (Zoe Sallis) that bears Abraham's first child Ishmael, Abraham going to war to free his nephew Lot (Gabriele Ferzetti), Lot's taking up residence in Sodom, the visitation of God through three angels (Peter O'Toole), Abraham's begging for the saving of Sodom should there be found ten righteous men, the destruction of Sodom, Lot's wife turning to salt, Sarah finally being able to bear a child, the birth of Isaac and the beginning of circumcision to mark the beginning of the Covenant, and then the sacrifice of Isaac.
I get why Huston, Christopher Fry (the screenwriter), and Dino Di Laurentiis decided to include it all, but it's enough for its own feature length film, keeping it at the back of this film doesn't help things, and then having it be this structureless mess (presumably) because that's how it appears in the Bible was a mistake. The fairly high highs of the first half are undone by the dragging second, and that's really its only problem: its structure poorly so it drags. Scott is good as Abraham. Gardner is good as Sarah. O'Toole is a nice addition to the cast.
Overall, I'm not sure I'd recommend the whole thing as a viewing experience. There isn't a whole lot narratively connecting one bit from the next (though one of the bridging sequences, a bit showing Noah's descendants in silhouette, looks really good), so all you have is that they all come from the same book. It's not really how you gain and sustain interest in filmed entertainment, and I wish more had been done to address that. I would probably recommend the individual pieces, though, especially the Cain and Abel and Noah segments. Maybe watch Malick's Creation of the Cosmos and then start this with the creation of Adam (a very interesting series of dissolves that I really liked).
So, on the one hand, this is Huston pushing himself while well-utilizing a huge budget from Italian sources for 20th Century Fox. On the other, he's too loyal to the source, dragging it down as a film. I did like the film and enjoyed the experience on the whole, but I still feel like it could have been more.
The major stories from the opening book of the Bible told in the film are the creation, the expulsion from Paradise, the murder of Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, and then as much of Abraham as possible. My favorite of the major short films is Cain (Richard Harris) murdering Abel (Franco Nero), which also happens to be the second shortest of them at about ten minutes. My least favorite is Abraham (George C. Scott), and it really amounts to the fact that so much gets told and without any real eye towards narrative structure. We end up lurching back and forth from one major storyline to the next without any real contextualizing adhesive to make them relate to each other on any deeper level than they're all happening around the same guy.
And I think that points to the one main issue with the film, a film that I overall appreciate. The film is at war with itself as to whether it is a cinematic adaptation of the source material, as evidenced most strongly in the early creation montage, or a more literal translation of the Bible's events like the telling of Abraham's story. I think it only fully commits to the cinematic side of things in that Cain and Abel story, most of it hinging on Harris' tortured performance as Cain, screaming to the skies as John Huston as the Voice of God asks where his brother has gone.
The story that strikes the best balance between the two is the story of Noah. Keeping dialogue largely to a minimum, it shows Noah (Huston again) as the patriarch of his family organizing the construction of the ark, the procession of animals, the torrential rainstorm (water miniatures are hard to do, and this film does them quite well), and the waiting for hitting land. It's a documentation of the events with enough cinematic flare to keep it from feeling stodgy.
I do wish that he had kept the voiceover out of the opening thirty minutes or so, showing creation (if you gave a student editor 10 hours of stock footage and told him to make creation, this is about what he would have come up with) and Adam (Michael Parks) and Eve (Ulla Bergryd) eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The voiceover makes it feel like translation where, I kept imagining it without the voiceover, it could have been something more purely cinematic without it. I kept thinking that no one was ever going to come to this movie as a substitute for the Holy Book, so why no trust the audience to know it well enough to be able to follow along without Huston's sonorous voice making it more obvious. I was reminded more than once of Terrence Malick's creation of the cosmos sequence in The Tree of Life. Visually, Eden reminded me heavily of John Boorman's Excalibur as well, though I assume that they just had the same predecessor influences rather than this being inspiration for the King Arthur film.
The Tower of Babel is a short sequence, but it was obviously very expensive with huge crowd shots and one very large set (Noah's Ark was also a very large set, so is the later Sodom set...this was obviously filmed in Italy). It's interesting to watch.
And then there's Abraham. Now, I don't think that any one part of the Abraham story is all that bad, it's just everything without any sense of structure. There's his relationship with Sarah (Ava Gardner), her inability to have children, her Egyptian slave Hagar (Zoe Sallis) that bears Abraham's first child Ishmael, Abraham going to war to free his nephew Lot (Gabriele Ferzetti), Lot's taking up residence in Sodom, the visitation of God through three angels (Peter O'Toole), Abraham's begging for the saving of Sodom should there be found ten righteous men, the destruction of Sodom, Lot's wife turning to salt, Sarah finally being able to bear a child, the birth of Isaac and the beginning of circumcision to mark the beginning of the Covenant, and then the sacrifice of Isaac.
I get why Huston, Christopher Fry (the screenwriter), and Dino Di Laurentiis decided to include it all, but it's enough for its own feature length film, keeping it at the back of this film doesn't help things, and then having it be this structureless mess (presumably) because that's how it appears in the Bible was a mistake. The fairly high highs of the first half are undone by the dragging second, and that's really its only problem: its structure poorly so it drags. Scott is good as Abraham. Gardner is good as Sarah. O'Toole is a nice addition to the cast.
Overall, I'm not sure I'd recommend the whole thing as a viewing experience. There isn't a whole lot narratively connecting one bit from the next (though one of the bridging sequences, a bit showing Noah's descendants in silhouette, looks really good), so all you have is that they all come from the same book. It's not really how you gain and sustain interest in filmed entertainment, and I wish more had been done to address that. I would probably recommend the individual pieces, though, especially the Cain and Abel and Noah segments. Maybe watch Malick's Creation of the Cosmos and then start this with the creation of Adam (a very interesting series of dissolves that I really liked).
So, on the one hand, this is Huston pushing himself while well-utilizing a huge budget from Italian sources for 20th Century Fox. On the other, he's too loyal to the source, dragging it down as a film. I did like the film and enjoyed the experience on the whole, but I still feel like it could have been more.